Evangelion episode 10 question

emptymercuryangel3 years ago8

TL;DR Shinji's mech actually did sustain damage pretty fast if you look closely. It's starting to melt already.

The longer bit (if you're curious) because I actually just watched this episode again today and the details of this show fascinate me: I feel it's pretty internally consistent from what I saw.

When Eva-01 dives in to save 02 you can notice degradations on its' chassis, like it's beginning to melt. It's a subtle though and easy to miss if you're not already thinking about it because of the saturated red hue - I had to rewind to double-check because I was wondering the same thing and clearly they're not immune to the extreme temperature, and thus we can assume that naked exposure would still cause pretty serious damage over a long period of time. This paired with the depth of the operation would lead to magma leaking into the Eva which would inevitably cause the damage to start rapidly accelerating in severity as the whole structure becomes compromised - while the external armor plating could conceivably hold for a while the internals are likely going to fry much, much quicker. And remember, this isn't water - this is magma, which is several orders of magnitude denser. If I'm not mistaken this means the pressure would be overwhelming even at a pretty shallow depth compared to diving under water.

Also a thing to keep in mind throughout the show is that recuperating from the costs of each operation is always a tremendous hassle - NERV staff are pretty much constantly overworked (this gets complained about in passing by a lot of characters in further episodes) and their budget is a constant tug-of-war with the UN. Given that this was initially going to be a slow and methodical operation rather than a combat scenario they prepared accordingly to keep operational costs to an absolute minimum while also ensuring success. Even if survival wasn't a primary concern they would still want to do whatever they could to prevent additional stress from being put onto their resources.

But additionally (and finally) - the mech's integrity might hold briefly when submerged, but it would has no way to vent the extreme heat. The pilot's immersion chamber might be able to stay relatively cool for a minute or two, but the fact that they also felt the need to outfit Asuka with heat resistant gear implies they were expecting the mech's internals to get extremely hot even with the diving gear (the cables on 02's back were part of the plan to keep Asuka cool as they were being used to vent heat as well through coolant, I believe). Shinji's dive was probably not long enough to have to worry about him getting boiled alive in the immersion chamber, but Asuka was projected to spend upwards of a dozen minutes submerged.

Sorry for the ramble, couldn't help myself, but I hope that helps to clear that up.

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